it as a system and understanding the parts.

For this reason, I refer to my

approach to states of consciousness as a system approach.
To understand the constructed system we call a state of consciousness,
we begin with some theoretical postulates based on human experience.
The first postulate is the existence of a basic awareness. Because some
volitional control of the focus of awareness is possible, we generally refer
to it as attention/awareness. We must also recognize the existence of self-
awareness, the awareness of being aware.
Further basic postulates deal with structures, those relatively
permanent structures/functions/subsystems of the mind/brain that act on
information to transform it in various ways. Arithmetical skills, for
example, constitute a (set of related) structure(s). The structures of
particular interest to us are those that require some amount of
attention/awareness to activate them. Attention/awareness acts as
psychological energy in this sense. Most techniques for controlling the
mind are ways of deploying attention/awareness energy and other kinds
of energies so as to activate desired structures (traits, skills, attitudes) and
deactivate undesired structures.
Psychological structures have individual characteristics that limit and
shape the ways in which they can interact with one another. Thus the
possibilities of any system built of psychological structures are shaped
and limited both by the deployment of attention/awareness and other
energies and by the characteristics of the structures comprising the
system. The human biocomputer, in other words, has a large but limited
number of possible modes of functioning.
Because we are creatures with a certain kind of body and nervous
system, a large number of human potentials are in principle available to
use. but each of us is born into a particular culture that selects and
develops a small number of these potentials, rejects others, and is
ignorant of many. The small number of experiential potentials selected by
our culture, plus some random factors, constitute the structural elements
from which our ordinary state of consciousness is constructed. We are at
once the beneficiaries and the victims of our culture's particular selection.
The possibility of tapping and developing latent potentials, which lie
outside the cultural norm, by entering an altered state of consciousness,
by temporarily restructuring consciousness, is the basis of the great
interest in such states.
The terms states of consciousness and altered state of consciousness